Wednesday, August 24, 2011

More news from 4.3

Patch 4.3+
The new 5 man dungeons will help to introduce the Deathwing Raid.
The current plan with the Deathwing raid is to have it all available immediately upon release.
The Deathwing raid will be smaller than Ulduar with many phases or encounters with Deathwing.
Patch 4.4 will bring a world event before the next expansion.
The next expansion should be released with a "meaningful difference" in the release timeline compared to previous expansions.

Future Changes and Features
Paid Guild Transfers are still in the works.
Battle.net account wide achievements are still in the works.
Armor dyes are unlikely to be included in the game, but mount customization is a possibility.
Class Quests are unlikely to return due to the amount of time it takes to design and implement them.
No gold sinks are coming soon because of the large variance in the amount of gold players have.
A real money Auction House is not planned for WoW.

Other Notes
RealID LFD grouping was originally going to be paid because of the similarity to Paid Character Transfers, but they decided it was the right thing for the game to offer it for free.
Cross realm RealID grouping is going to be expanded to cover Battlegrounds as well. Depending on how well that works it could be expanded to raids and rated battlegrounds.
There has been a drop in gold farming because phishing and hacking accounts is more profitable.
New players are still having trouble with the first 30 minutes and five levels of the game, more hand holding is coming for very basic concepts like moving, questing, fighting, and looting.
Blizzard did a lot to save time while getting Cataclysm finished, but ended up happy with the final result.
The shared 10 and 25 man lockout has had both positive and negative effects, it solved the need to do both every week but removed some extra content that could be done every week. Some changes will be made in the future to make everyone happier with the solution.

So, there is some more news. I knew that the 5 mans would likely be similar to the Lich King 5 mans they added around the time Icecrown was released.

Having Battle.net achievments would be awesome. You could do certain things on certain characters that you would prefer to do it on. If you have a character you enjoy PvPing on, you can still get the achievments for your main.

They are making the starting zones easier.....because mobs that dont aggro on you, built in quest helper, and ridiculous health and mana regen out of combat were not enough! It really doest make much difference to me, but if it can help a new player then why not?